Five sets of longitudinal data on five hearing children born of deaf parents will be brought together for the first time. These children varied widely in the degree to which they were exposed to spoken English in their early language learning period. There has been extensive debate over how much and what kind of exposure is necessary to form the basis for language learning. Hearing children of deaf parents make up a population that is especially relevant for testing hypotheses about the role of spoken input for spoken language acquisition. We propose to examine a number of aspects of the content, form and usage of spoken English in our combined sample. Comparisons will be made between the language development of these children and that of children learning spoken English in a normal setting, which have been reported in the literature. The results of these comparisons will be interpreted in light of theoretical perspectives on the role of spoken language input in language acquisition. Hypotheses will be formed which could be tested in future studies. The formal results of this study will be prepared for publication.